CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

Exactly. We’re all out here licking corporate boots by clicking traffic lights for free, propping up their data plantations under the guise of “security.” Google turned paranoia into profit, and now Cloudflare’s farming our fingerprints like we’re glorified dairy cows.

That $3 settlement? Peanuts to keep us complacent while they mint billions off our collective unpaid labor. The real CAPTCHA is figuring out how to burn this extractive circus to the ground before we’re all indentured to their algorithmic overlords.

It starts with striking till Musk is out of government, otherwise:
- How much is rent for one of those fuckers though?
- If standing around doesn't make him stop we have to be prepared to do the things we all know are required to stop fascists.

I love how it has taken this long for media to cover this issue. I thought this was common knowledge for about a decade

I stopped having any faith in google when Gmail came out and I noticed ads related to the content of my email. It would be naive to think that data usage was limited to showing targeted ads.

I had to go through seven captcha screens a couple of days ago just to apply for a fucking job.

If I wasn't so desperate for work, I would have said fuck it. I hate it.

It's the first qualification you need to have
- I guess so, but I was starting to think maybe I was a robot after about the fourth.

You know, I think the best way for the Internet as a whole to stop using people as product, is to have a worldwide publically subsidised Internet, like the BBC or PBS but it is the Internet. The governments pitches in just like with any global programmes.

People buy magnets and tape them to their body because they think it cures cancer.
Why would these people use free Internet when premium luxury deluxe Internet is available for only .99¢ a month.
And then why wouldn't PLDI, Inc founder not use his influence to get elected president and kill that bad public Internet.
- Worse than magnets, "negative ion" wearables are strong radioactive aources
- Why would these people use free Internet when premium luxury deluxe Internet is available for only .99¢ a month.
  Same reason as why public broadcasting still exist and is quite popular.
  It is about having choice to be a product of the Internet titans or not.
The best way is for people to stop trying to make as much money as possible with as little effort as possible.
It's not about keeping the lights on, putting kids through school, or putting bread on the table. It's about living as luxurious a life as possible with as little effort as possible. That's it.
If these people were forced to do more with less, they would because they have no other choice. They have other choices, so that's what they take.
I'm sorry, but people like you are actually helping them by peddling the narrative that they need this money. They don't. Plenty of people work harder than them for less because they have no choice.
We need to stop giving businesses decisions on how to f**k us and just band together with higher standards so they make less profit.
Everyone who gives them money should be seen as a class traitor, because that's what they are.
- No idea what you're talking about, but most people are not trying to get endorsements.
- just band together
  Good luck!
That would be awesome but I don't see it working in practice. The BBC at least is losing it's independence, I don't know about PBS. Imagine Trump now controlling the internet directly for 4 years.
- Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Pichai were all sitting behind him at his inauguration.
I already pay for internet access. I think most people do. Use that money.
- Are you saying to use that money to pay every single company not to use my data without my permission?

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/buster-captcha-solver-for/mpbjkejclgfgadiemmefgebjfooflfhl

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/

A useful extension. Works 90% of the time for me.

Thanks. Gonna try this out.
Holy shit I'm trying this
Edit: it works.
Reviews on the Firefox one says it requires you to download and install another app for it to work. Screw that nonsense.
- The success rate of the extension can be improved by simulating user interactions with the help of a client app.
  It's optional
I wish they had mobile versions. :/
Awesome! Thanks.
You are amazing it just works.

The details are horrific:

819 million hours spent solving CAPTCHAs.

$6.1 billion worth of our time at the US federal minimum wage.

134 Petabytes of internet bandwidth.

consuming 7.5 million kWhs of energy.

which produced 7.5 million pounds of CO2 pollution.

This one's from the author of the article: putting the 819 million hours against the average human lifespan of 79 years, that's 1,182.7 lifetimes spent solving CAPTCHAs.

Compare it to some stats for some truly useless Internet services if you really want to make a point

The shit has absolutely destroyed the internet. they only keep getting worse, taking more time and making me feel more stupid. there is no God.

Click the squares with your freedom in them:

Really? 100 hours on average for each person on the globe, including babies, the elderly, and those in extreme poverty? That seems like a lot

Ridiculous, this number is clearly fake. Not saying that the highlighted subject is not an issue, it really is, but why lie about the number ? I'm sure the real number is impressive enough
- I guess I do one or two a day on average, say 500 a year. At 5 seconds each, thats about 42 mins a year. I'm a fairly heavy user too. Recaptcha has been round for what, 15-20 years? So that's like 15 hours total at a rough guess..
It's over a 13 year period:
The researchers took the average completion time of 3.53 seconds across both image and behavior CAPTCHAs and multiplied that against a low-end estimate of 512 billion v1 and v2 reCAPTCHAs completed across the internet between 2010 and 2023, resulting in the following estimations of their impact on our lives:
It ends up being like, .175 seconds per day for the average internet user after some rough estimates
- .175s x 365 x 13 ~= 830s per person over 13 year. Which is little less than 14min per user. Scaling by 8 billion people (which is way above the average amount over the period) that's 1.8 billion hours, which is 450 times less than the announced number

I always click wrong stuff first to see which captcha is training on my input and which one is actually checking what I click.

how do you tell by doing that?
- If you click on the wrong stuff and it lets you through then it's training.

I got my compensation money from a different lawsuit, it was totally worth the ~$3usd

Hey at least you bought the lawyers in charge another summer home.

It's a free service that's been provided to website makers to easily add a way to reduce bot spam. And for a very long time, it worked

Captcha got tonnes of free training data, and in return website maintainer got an incredibly handy free tool to help secure their site.

Captcha 100% could have charged licensing for their tool, could charged money for developers to use their service.

They didn't, and I think it's perfectly reasonable they got the training data as "payment" instead.

Your favorite free websites you use get to have another part of their architecture stay free.

The website maintainer get an awesome free tool.

Captcha got training data to profit off of.

That's good internet where everyone wins without the need for bullshit licensing and fees and royalties and subscriptions.

Would you have rather your Netflix account cost an extra 15 cents per month or whatever to offset yet another licensing cost for some captcha tool?

Would you have rather your Netflix account cost an extra 15 cents per month or whatever to offset yet another licensing cost for some captcha tool?
Err... couldn't the corporation just make less profit but still provide the service as-is?
- Then how would line go up?
- Right let's get everyone to reinvent the wheel
CAPTCHAs make web sites awful to use, and waste the limited lifespans of billions of people.
There are other ways to manage bots.
- Not easily, and not at the time, no, it really was a very easy way to quickly reduce bot problems at the time.
  You'd get random spam for stuff that could flood your forums or etc, and setting up captcha had an extremely immediate and palpable effect on reducing the spam that came in from random bot farms and shit.
  I can personally confirm that when I implemented captcha on my forums i maintained 14 years ago, it pretty substantially reduced spammers by a huge degree.
- I'm not a website administrator so I'm out of the loop. Other ways to manage bots? Like what?
Captcha was never good at stopping bots. It was always used to identify who is a human. In other words exactly the opposite of what you think.
Edit: because I see confusion, maybe a language barrier, here is an example of what people think it is and how it works: https://youtube.com/shorts/rme6PT7-CRI Which is wrong on many levels.
Here is a better explanation of what I meant: https://youtu.be/VTsBP21-XpI
Hope this explains it better than my original comment.
- I can personally confirm it very much did help curb botting issues on my website.
- That doesn't make sense. There are only bots and humans. Identifying humans is stopping bots, and vice versa.

yeah, clicking on the checkmark means you are giving them permission to view info about your browser history, and what you did on those sites.

For every site that uses it and reports back to Google for their ad money.

I still couldn't figure out from the article how google supposedly makes money off of captchas. I had to go about 2 levels down from the article to end up at a long, drawn out youtube video and then had to search some more to find out the "I'm not a robot" page tracks small mouse cursor movements to see if you are human.

And track you across the internet for ad revenue and… other things.
- That is cookies I assume and probably data sharing between websites. I know if I look up something on amazon I immediately start seeing ads for related stuff on FB and on google.

Insane! Thanks for sharing.

I knew it was training LLMs. I had a just had a feeling that it was, not any specific evidence. I hate being right all the time. -_-

Not LLMs, self-driving cars. Ever noticed how most of the challenges are things you need to recognize while driving?
- Yeah you’re probably right, but Google doesn’t have a self driving car right? I guess they are just selling it the data.
Feeling? Google literally states this is one of their goals:
Every time our CAPTCHAs are solved, that human effort helps digitize text, annotate images, and build machine learning datasets. This in turn helps preserve books, improve maps, and solve hard AI problems.
https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/?hl=es%2Findex.html